About 3.45am on Friday our blue heeler Jack collapsed in the back yard on his nightly toilet break. He could not move his back legs and his breathing was hideously laboured. Mum woke me in my room with alarm in her voice and we worked together to bring Jack inside — it was cold overnight — but our boy insisted on trying to walk, half dragging himself over the threshold of the front door before collapsing again and searching for breath.
He is 27kg and a paralysis tick the size of grain of rice was killing him.
We live an hour from the closest emergency vet, in Brisbane, and we needed to bring him in immediately, they said. I picked up my boy and carried him to the car and we drove the lonely road into the city while Jack fought for breath in the back seat. We arrived at 5am and said our goodbyes as he was rushed off for treatment.
Such treatment, I’m learning, is no sure thing.
So begins one of the worst weekends I’ve experienced in the past few years at least, personally and professionally. I learned, way too late on Thursday, that the newspaper for which I work was running a comment piece that amounted to an elaborate and completely inaccurate defence of the columnist’s friend of 40 years, Renee Leon, for her role in the Robodebt scheme. I told my editor repeatedly that I had significant and unresolved concerns about the lack of disclosure made by the columnist in the first instance, the apparently deliberate misreading of the Royal Commission findings into her friend and, subsequently, the unethical use of her analysis spot in our newspaper to prosecute her specious arguments. To the extent that any changes were made to the copy at all — I never got to read it — they were made at my vehement insistence.
They were not enough and I told my editor that I would have no choice but to publicly condemn the column and the decision to publish it. He accepted this.
Having filed my own piece on a short week, off the back of narrating the audiobook version of my book Mean Streak about the Robodebt saga for 25 hours in a sealed booth over five days, we went to print that Thursday night and I was woken to the news of Jack just a few hours later. Friday was a strange between-state of these twin horrors. Jack was both alive and dead, the newspaper was printed but not yet published. In such suspended corridors of time, one tends to elope from real life.
Nothing else mattered. Does it ever?
On Saturday morning both superposition states seemed to resolve themselves. I woke to the news from Mum that Jack had taken a turn during the night and it was now all but certain he was not going to make it through. We would travel back to Brisbane this morning to make the arrangements and say goodbye. Mum was crying. She said something that may be funny one day but which wasn’t in the moment. ‘We’re going to have to get him cremated,’ she told me, ‘I can’t dig a hole that big.’ I agreed with the course of action and retreated to the kitchen to make my first coffee for the day and so I could weep silently, looking out at the back garden.
The past two weeks — the past two years — I feel like I was trying so hard to keep my world together and now, in that moment, all I wanted to do was tear it apart. It seems almost silly to say any of this about a dog, even an almost 14-year-old one, and the depth of my despair surprised even me. It was all just so unfair. Before we left for Brisbane, I told Mum, there was something I needed to sort out.
With coffee, I opened the column I knew to expect and read it for the first time. This was a kind of grief, too. As I said on Saturday, a betrayal. Betrayals are little deaths.
It’s not that I disagreed with it being written at all, or even that someone who — after being asked for it — finally declared she had known Renee Leon for four decades and maybe even lived with her for a time wanted to defend their friend. It’s that it contained deliberate untruths, selective highlighting and was misleading in the extreme. It was designed to do all of these things because its author was not attempting to get to the truth but only to exonerate her friend from the findings of two year-long inquiries that made their assessments based on documentary and contemporaneous evidence. Such hackery might be welcome at other newspapers but I remain of the view we should not indulge it. Save it for the (deleted) LinkedIn comments, Chris Wallace.
I’m not writing a newsletter about this specifically, to be honest, because I am fucking tired. Of everything. And I’ve largely covered it here where I explain that Renee Leon was in charge of Robodebt for two years and misled the Commonwealth Ombudsman and also waited until the last possible moment to ‘stop’ the program she claims to have stopped. I mention it here because this was all unfolding as I thought we were about to lose our dog and it all just felt so God damned bleak.
We left for Brisbane after I’d said what needed saying about the oped. The trip was uneasy because we drove toward an understanding; a finality. Fat smoke from hazard reduction burns sat like fog across the landscape. It was a gorgeous blue sky day run through a photocopier.
Everything was dry and wrong.
We didn’t know then that actually, there was hope; that Jack was a grumpy old bastard who was fighting. We didn’t know that, actually, he was sedated but awake and aware of his surroundings. When we arrived the vet, Chloe, asked if we wanted to see him. Of course we wanted to see him.
Our boy Jack was still so very sick. He was an appliance. Wires ran from him as rays leave the sun. When he saw Mum, however, he sat bolt upright and his tail thumped the cage. I will never forget the look of fear and relief in his eyes as he saw us in this strange place for the first time in more than 24 hours. The paralysis tick had been attached for long enough that his breathing had become stressed and was in the process of shutting down. Administering a tick anti-serum prevents further toxins attaching to muscle receptors (and switching them off) but it cannot remove the toxin already present from the blood. There is a lag time, then, between what you manage to stop now and what is still working its way through the system.
Jack was relying on oxygen and while we were there the vet asked if I could fix it for them because he is a heeler and gets a bit snappy when frightened and upset. Honey, don’t we all. Funny that the most tender I have ever been has been while trying to adjust the oxygen tube prongs through his muzzle so that the vets didn’t have to put him under again, saving him from more stress on his grumpy bear body.
We’ve never been in this situation before as a family, through all the cats and dogs we’ve had in my 37 years. And just as well. The bill so far is at almost $8000 which we can afford but couldn’t have even two years ago. Mum read out the invoice for the anti-tick serum alone which was $466. I said it makes sense, given how specialised the product is. Then added: ‘Maybe we could have found a cheaper one on Temu.’
The jokes have only started again, tentatively, in the last day as Jack moved from the critical danger period to one of simple watch-and-wait. Now, it seems, we will be able to take him home tomorrow but I remain cautious. My heart cannot absorb more ricochet through the extremes of expectation and reality.
I don’t have anything clever or circular to end with. I know there are bigger problems in the world, in Australia, than my sick dog and people who selectively read a Royal Commission report.
Here is something else I know all too well.
It’s the small things, overlooked or underappreciated, that have the potential to cause great harm.
I cant understand why Wallaces piece was published ; I am so sick of hearing that its tough being a public servant as you are scared to have ethics as you might get fired. They get paid the big bucks so be held to account as they have no hesitation to persue the vulnerable, less fortunate if they think it makes them look good. I really am not sure I will continue to subscribe to the Saturday paper given they chose to publish that piece of diatribe. Bitterly dissapointed for you, for robodebt victims and I hope with my heart that Jacks ok...
oh my heart on reading that. you are a master and we are so lucky to have you. All my best wishes and crossed fingers for you, your mum and your tough doggo